RATING:
Will The House Bunny finally be the movie that makes Anna Faris a star? I’ve watched this young actress with interest since she did a spot-on Cameron Diaz impression in Lost in Translation, waiting for her to catch fire. Since then, she’s been a fixture in that moronic Scary Movie franchise (playing the clueless [...]

RATING:
To say that I’m not the target audience for Death Race is a bit like saying that Ray Lewis is not the target audience for Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Suffice it to say, I held up my end of the bargain: I hated this loud, violent, retrograde movie, a remake of the Roger Corman [...]

RATING:
As Hamlet 2 begins, a British narrator (uncredited, but I think Jeremy Irons) begins intoning pretentious truisms about the craft of ahcting, as our hero,  Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan), is shown in one ignominious acting gig—herpes ad; TV shopping network shill; Xena the Warrior Princess villain—after the other. That disconnect, between harsh reality and [...]

RATING:
Behind-the-scenes casting decisions are rarely made public—it’s only way after the fact that we discover that John Travolta turned down the Richard Gere role in American Gigolo, or that Mel Gibson was tapped to play Russell Crowe’s part in Gladiator—but it seems pretty clear to me that Rainn Wilson was not the first choice [...]

RATING:
When it comes to the more recent works of Woody Allen, we film critics have begun to rely on a standard script. There’s the “he’s washed up!” line that came on the heels of such disappointments as Hollywood Ending and Anything Else. There’s the “it’s not half bad but he’ll never be truly great [...]

RATING:
About 5 minutes into Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the new animated film from Lucas Studios, I turned to my friend Travis and said, “Wait. I thought Anakin went bad in Revenge of the Sith. Then why is he swashbuckling right alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi?” “Because this film takes place before that one,” he explained.
Let [...]

RATING:
Never has the expression “no guts, no glory” been more apt than in describing the new comedy Tropic Thunder.
The film demonstrates tons of guts—it has one character in blackface, another making fun of a mentally disabled man, and yet a third who is a vulgarian Jewish film executive. (What, no jokes about killing [...]

RATING:
Anyone who watches the new documentary American Teen, about high school life in a small town in Indiana, will be compelled to cast a fictitious version of the film in their mind. Alt-rocky, angsty teen girl Hannah Bailey could be played by Julia Stiles, who played a similar character in 10 Things I Hate [...]

RATING:
I have a vague early memory of a blurry picture in my parents’ New York Times of some nutjob who strung a wire from one Twin Tower to the other and walked across it.
That nutjob was Philippe Petit and he was an acrobat, provocateur, performance artist, and utterly magnetic life force. In Man on [...]

RATING:
There’s a certain contract that the creators of a stoner comedy make with the audience: There will be lots of doobie jokes, lots of infantile men over-reacting (and sometimes, drastically under-reacting) to the madcap misadventures they’ve gotten themselves into, and, most importantly, the whole proposition will be amiable, no-consequence fun. While Pineapple Express follows [...]